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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

It's looking good until you start to see the US gov forcing cloudflare to block hugging face and others.

They'll just make it a crime to run the models unless they authorize you (classifying it as a munition, like they tried to do with encryption), and if your power bill is suspicious you'll find yourself in jail.

Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.

No need to block the download.

Citizens were and are free to use the technology (cryptography and every other export-controlled item); your "power bill is suspicious, go to jail" FUD doesn't really track with history.

> Any company providing the models will be deemed a threat to national security.

Any company providing specifically-controlled models to foreigners would hypothetically be prosecuted.

There's a famous poem called "First They Came" about how slippery this slope can be in a heated political climate.

I don't believe for a second this ends with "foreigners", this is about setting up infrastructure for controlling the technology. Foreigners are just the current excuse.

Note that TFA mentions they are supposedly hand-picking access to whoever they want, based on whatever criteria they want, already.

Ah, invoking Godwin. "First they came" in 1976 when ITAR was first passed, or maybe "first they came" in the 1940s when we didn't export Proximity Fuzes, right?

Countries are free to prevent exports of technology. Equating export controls with the Holocaust is disgusting.

I did not bring in Godwin, but I guess he's here now :D.

I'm more trying to invoke GRRM. This is a Game of Thrones: billionaire CEO's complain about each other to the government to get their competitors blocked/tripped up with acts of fiat, which is what happened with Fable 5.

And in the linked post, it says GPT-5.6 access decisions are supposedly just hand picked.

The stories about export controls are just songs they sing to the peasants.

There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.

> I did not bring in Godwin

Who is the "They" in "First They Came" referring to exactly?

> There are claims that Chinese companies are mining + reselling Claude subscriptions like crazy anyway.

Which will become a felony with export-controlled models, which is why identity verification is becoming a thing.

Nobody was compared to the nazis, so Godwin's law is not yet relevant in this discussion.

I'm sure cooky old Martin Niemöller just dreamt that poem up out of nowhere and his time spent in in Dachau had nothing to do with it.

This isn’t a random Nazi analogy, it’s a cautionary tale about how stepwise exclusions plus bystander apathy work. The whole point is to think about it before it’s too late.

The comparison to cryptography export restrictions is absolutely valid, but is that really favorable?

I'd argue that 70's cryptography export bans in hindsight look completely misguided, futile, burdensome and pointless in the end (which is why most of it was lifted/reverted over the last decades).

I don't see how AI-models are much different; it's certainly a better comparison than the fuzes, because we're both not at war right now and the underlying principle is already out of the bag.

Cryptography export restrictions absolutely worked until the internet became commonplace, and then they became futile and were removed.

Just like every other export restriction on technology: once the actual cat is out of the actual bag, they are often relaxed.

The "underlying principles" here are hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D - which is what is required to compete with the frontier models.

> not at war right now

We weren't technically at war during the Cold War, either.

Why do they need to "force Cloudflare" to do anything?

Why wouldn't they just tell Hugging Face that they need to abide export restrictions directly - they're an American company?

Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?

Because the models don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face. You can create a Model Card repository containing your README and from there you include instructions or a custom script in your repository that allows authenticated users to download the model.

> Doesn't sound dystopian enough without a second compelled entity?

This is the second snarky question you've made today, the other in relation to the export limit.

> Is this just upsetting because it's a product you want to enjoy?

Both are assumptions you are making and don't provide much in the way of constructive conversation, if I'm wrong about something it's alright to just point it out.

> don't necessarily need to be hosted on hugging face.

Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.

> This is the second snarky question you've made today

It's not snark: why would Cloudflare somehow be legally or technically relevant in the context of two American companies distributing export-restricted materials? HN seems to love the "Cloudflare controls the internet!" "NSA bad!" trope.

> Export restrictions don't split generally hairs on technicalities like "hosting" - the "but magnet links aren't actually torrents!" defense doesn't fly when $1M fines and federal felonies are at stake. All distribution or "causing" distribution to restricted entities is prohibited.

So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ? The government would need to subpoena each model that was in the US individually, why would they do that when they could simply pull clout over CloudFlare, which we have seen governments do around the world. Either CloudFlare comply, or they're added a block list.

> https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo...

This is not a new thing, anyway this discussion has become too argumentative for an off the cuff comment about government over-reach.

> So why would open models that are not in the US be restricted ?

Nobody said they would be?

> subpoena each model that was in the US individually

What does this even mean? Where did 'subpoenas' come into this conversation and how would that be useful?

> simply pull clout over CloudFlare

Cloudflare is an American CDN. Hugging Face is an American catalog/distributor (whatever semantic game you want to play) of models. Some of those models could be declared export-regulated. No subpoena is necessary to prevent Hugging Face or Cloudflare from distributing ITAR/EAR software, declaring any model as such, nor is trying to block something heavy-handedly at the CDN level necessary: Hugging Face will gladly comply with fine-grained requests.

"La Liga" obviously isn't American, which is why Spanish courts are compelling their ISPs (who they actually do control) to block Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's customers - who are likely not Spanish - are distributing materials Spanish courts do not approve of. If Spain had the means to compel Cloudflare or their customers in question to do anything, they wouldn't need to take such a blunt approach and block other legitimate customers. Cloudflare isn't involved in that equation and this isn't at all equivalent.

I'm going to give you some free advice. Don't assume so much. It's usually a bad start to your point of view, if you assume, you only know what's in your head and not the facts of the matter so sometimes it can come across as if you're saying something you have insight into, but when other people know better, it sounds quite ignorant.

Honestly. It's been sage advice for me. And maybe for others.

Edit : There's no need to be so argumentative also, I'm not 'against' you or your point, just pointing out some other pov. We're here to discuss.

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